2018-19 Solar Car Challenge Blog

About the Team

We are a group of high school students of all grade levels committed to engineering and collaborating to solve real world problems with a particular focus on green energy and the environment. To this end, we participate in various design challenges in the field of renewable energy.

Team History

Though our team is not an old one, having only been established three years ago, we have already achieved a great deal of success through a number of projects.

Kidwind

Three years ago, several of our founding members participated in the Kidwind competition, an entry-level competition which has middle and high school students build and test basic wind turbines in order to demonstrate mastery of the fundamentals of wind power and design within given parameters.

National Kidwind finals: Our Winning Turbine Preparing for Testing

Four teams from RAHS were sent to the Kidwind national finals securing 1st, 2nd, and 4th. This success inspired us to formally organize ourselves into a unified team, founding Green Energy Team and looking towards more ambitious future projects.

Collegiate Wind Challenge

Following Kidwind, the next logical progression for our first project as a united team was the Collegiate Wind Challenge. The CWC is an NREL sponsored nationwide design competition which has teams design and builds a refined, high efficiency, small-scale wind turbine to survive and perform under rigorous testing conditions and built to stringent specifications along with an accompanying business plan. As the first high school team to participate in this challenge, there were many obstacles, both technical and bureaucratic, to overcome, but we succeeded in delivering a product and testing at both at the 2017 CWC technical challenge in Boulder and 2018 CWC in Chicago.

Team in Boulder

Team members completing final assembly of turbine in Boulder prior to testing

Building off our progress from the 2017 CWC Technical Challenge, we set our sights on the main CWC in Chicago for 2018. We improved our design, and refined our manufacturing processes in order to create a much improved, far more sophisticated offering for Chicago with an updated nacelle, new blades, a more advanced computerized control system, and upgraded electronics.

Turbine at CWC 2018 – Chicago

Turbine in wind tunnel preparing for testing at CWC 2018 – Chicago

The team in front of the NREL testing wind tunnel.

Although we were unable to officially compete against college teams, we successfully tested our turbine to the specifications of the competition and the turbine performed better than expected.

Solar Car Competition

After Collegiate Wind Challenge 2018, we felt we had achieved our potential and decided to move on to bigger, more ambitious projects. We’ve set out to compete for the first time in the 2019 Solar Car Competition. We are excited for this new and challenging project which we hope will be our greatest success yet.

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